Why the attempt to deplatform Trump failed so utterly

The 2024 election has conclusively proven something that we really should have known since 2016: America’s gatekeepers have failed.

The premise of “gatekeeping,” as a political enterprise, is that there is a mainstream consensus that can be enforced by institutions designed to protect it. It works not by outright violent repression, but by deplatforming and shunning certain ideas, people, movements, and the like.

Gatekeeping, when successful, involves a collective of recognized authority figures declaring that something is out of bounds — and then that thing actually getting consigned to the fringes. No politician will engage with it, no talk show hosts will give it a respectful hearing, and only a tiny number of citizens will have heard of it. Think of how nearly everyone agreed, after 9/11, that conspiracy theorizing about the attack deserved scorn.

Trump’s wins are proof that gatekeeping doesn’t really work anymore. Immediately after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, there was a brief moment when leaders across the political spectrum agreed Trump was too dangerous to be allowed to remain in politics — and even tried to drive him out. In a January 8 email, Rupert Murdoch wrote that “Fox News [is] very busy pivoting ... We want to make Trump a non person.”

Yet Murdoch failed, pivoting back to pro-Trump coverage almost immediately. Every other attempt to shun Trump into political nonexistence has met with similar failure.

This isn’t just a Trump phenomenon.

His chief allies and messengers — like Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Steve Bannon — have all been shunned or blacklisted to varying degrees. X/Twitter suffered a post-Musk ad revenue collapse, liberal musicians pulled their music from Spotify to pressure the streaming giant to drop Rogan, and Bannon just spent four months in federal prison (for good reason). None of these tactics have durably eroded these figures’ influence.

Nor is the failure of deplatforming even a famous person thing.

I’ve written extensively and repeatedly about the influence of obscure radicals on the mainstream Republican Party — the way that, for example, Vice President-elect JD Vance has explicitly cited someone who openly wants to topple American democracy as a key influence in his thinking about the executive branch. I’m hardly the only one: There’s a whole cottage industry of journalism devoted to tracing the linkages between the true fringe — internet weirdos with names like Bronze Age Pervert — and the Republican mainstream.

Such links are no longer hidden, but out in the open. Yet, with a few exceptions, this kind of reporting doesn’t seem to have hurt, and it sometimes even helps the targets of the gatekeepers’ ire by raising their profiles.

Again and again, we’ve seen the gatekeepers’ efforts to deplatform their enemies into oblivion fail. And I think it has a lot to do with a mistaken analysis of power — specifically, a failure to appreciate just how much people with devoted followings can get away with in the 21st-century political-media environment.

In the past, the American mainstream consensus was enforced through bipartisan political agreement and a cultural apparatus dominated by elite institutions: a shared set of norms in those environs helping to define the rules of the political game. If you broke those rules, either by (for example) insulting the troops or particular ethnic groups, you could risk electoral defeat or even being exiled from polite public life.

Trump’s 2016 rise to power and 2024 political resurrection help us see why neither political nor cultural elites can enforce their old rules anymore.

Anyone who heads one of the two major parties already has a baseline floor of about 46 to 47 percent of the electorate. The most important voters in deciding the general election are swing voters. In a highly polarized country with two very different parties, swing voters tend to be people who definitionally don’t have very strong partisan preferences, seeing both parties as potential options.

Candidates like Trump who enjoy unified support of a major party cannot truly be gatekept. They are definitionally part of the mainstream, and thus potentially electable thanks to the basic gravity of a two-party political system.

All of this raises the question: How is it that Trump, an extremist, managed to seize control of the Republican Party in the first place?

For reasons I’ve documented extensively, including in my book The Reactionary Spirit, Trump managed to build a direct bond with a critical mass of GOP primary voters rooted in shared resentments and fears. These voters, like Trump and unlike Democratic partisans, were largely disdainful of any elite attempts to gatekeep him — either from the cultural mainstream or even the alternative elites of the Republican Party, which back in 2016 tried and failed to stop his initial rise in power.

In other words, Trump short-circuited the gatekeeping capacity of both the Republican Party and mainstream media.

After January 6, when some Republican elites tried again to break with Trump, they faced immense backlash from their base. Three days after his “non-person” email, Murdoch was walking things back — telling his son Lachlan that “we have to lead our viewers, which is not as easy as it might seem.” Fox’s viewers actually forced its CEO to reboard the Trump train.

So it’s Trump’s personal support, his mass following, that gives him and aligned Republicans the power to resist gatekeepers.

There’s something else too. Shifts in the media landscape have allowed his allies in the cultural space to survive and even thrive for similar reasons.

In the past, it used to be hard enough to create a mass media enterprise that only a handful of people — the sorts who could operate television stations and mass newspaper distribution networks — could do it. Today, anyone can find fans on social media and work to monetize that following. Given direct access to a mass audience, unpopularity among cultural gatekeepers is far less of a concern than it used to be.

Joe Rogan has millions of dedicated fans; those fans like him much more than the people trying to make listeners feel bad for enjoying his show. Steve Bannon’s War Room show is super popular among the Trump faithful, and remains so despite (or perhaps because of) his stint in prison. Nick Fuentes’s weird and creepy fans don’t really care if the mainstream media calls them weird and creepy for stanning a Nazi incel. All enjoy a level of influence and power because of their ties to Republicans who are unwilling to be shamed for said connections.

This fragmented landscape means there’s not enough cultural unification to ever really expel anyone from the discourse. When Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, many wondered why it took them so long: it was Fox that held the power, not its popular but increasingly difficult employee. Yet Carlson’s post-Fox trajectory — a successful turn to Twitter/X broadcasting that earned him a seat next to Trump at the Republican National Convention — reveals that even the Murdoch empire couldn’t cancel someone with Carlson’s devoted following.

Even if someone doesn’t have the personal draw of a Carlson or a Rogan, there are institutions dedicated to serving ever more extreme audiences that might be willing to hire you. If you get “canceled” at a mainstream outlet, you can go to Fox. If you get kicked off Fox News, NewsMax and One America News Network are out there waiting.

To be clear, there are benefits to the end of gatekeeping. By concentrating power in a smaller number of people and institutions, the old consensus encouraged groupthink, resulting in, for example, widespread cheerleading for the 2003 Iraq War. The era of gatekeeping was also meaningfully less democratic, in that it gave elites far more power than the people as a collective to set the terms of public debate. The creator economy, for all its faults, gives citizens the ability to financially empower voices they believe are unfairly cut out of public life.

Yet those faults are undoubtedly immense.

Donald Trump, a man who literally incited a riot on the Capitol and has openly vowed to attack democratic institutions in his second term, is president-elect largely — if not primarily — because he built a following that allowed him to short-circuit elite gatekeepers in both parties. And the gatekeepers, for all their flaws, adhered to basic standards of evidence and decency that simply can’t be enforced in our new political-media environment. Does anyone really think this country is better off now that someone like Fuentes has the juice to secure dinner with the once and future president?

Regardless of how you normatively evaluate these trade-offs — ones that I think point to thorny conceptual problems for liberalism itself — we need to be clear on where we’re at empirically. And the fact is that Trump and aligned Republican extremists clearly can’t be criticized into defeat. Nor can Musk be shamed into managing X more responsibly or Rogan ignored into political oblivion.

Their opponents need a new tactic.